Its been half a moon. Fourteen nights.
This afternoon, Rio, Silas and I sat in a deli on Government Street in Victoria and ate bowls of soup and panini sandwiches.
Outside the overcast sky foretold of winter’s flat hand pressing down on the coast.
I woke feeling lonesome this morning.
It wasn’t a general loneliness. It was specific. It wasn’t a heart breaking kind of loneliness, it was a dull ache, like something stuck under my skin, that I couldn’t, and didn’t want to shake lose. Something beautiful, beneath my skin. Near my heart.
I sat with the boyz eating lunch, and trying to stay present to them.
A month ago I sat on the beach with James Pratt, drinking beer, watching kite-surfers skip across the water, and talked about life and love and loss. “We’re never alone,” he said, and he didn’t mean that in the city we can never find space for ourselves. What he meant was that the illusion of singularity which is a result of eyes that can’t see the world as it truly is, means we feel separate from one another. We’re not. Our eyes tell me that my body, my life, stops with my epidermis. But quantum physicists, Taoist mystics, ancient Vedic scientists of India, and scraggly-assed hippies, remind us that in fact you and I mingle as one. We emerge from the same quantum soup of energy and information; we are expressions of the same whirling mass of love, probability and tendency, connected in a way that we cannot see, but we can feel.
I grew up feeling lonely. I was a gangly, awkward, pimply kid who couldn’t open his mouth and say something charming if it was written down on cue cards for me to read. But I was a poet, and my heart ached for the love of a woman – Carrie, Kelly, Tracey, others – but my overtures always went unrequited. Late at night – sometimes in the early morning hours just before the sun came up – I would steal away home and sit under a street light and write really bad poetry filled with longing, desperation, and unfounded hope. Except for the time of day – I can’t stay up past 11 unless there’s a hot tub and a serious party – not much has changed, really.
I remember around the age of fifteen confiding in my mother that my heart just ached. She consoled me, and assured me that love would come.
Of course, it did. I had my first girlfriend when I was sixteen. When I eighteen I dated an amazing woman named Beth for nearly three years. When I moved to the mountains other woman came and went from my life. It was hard on my poet’s heart. I lived in Lake Louise, and nobody ever stuck around for long in Lake Louise, until I met Kat in 1995.
I remember living in Grand Canyon National Park for a winter in 1993 and 1994 and discovering Barry Lopez’s book River Notes: The Dance of Herons. In the story called The Bend he writes:
“I have lost as I have said, some sense of myself. I no longer require as much. And though I am hopeful of recovery, an adjustment as smooth as the way the river lies against the earth at this point, this is no longer the issue with me. I am more interested in this: from above, to a hawk, the bend [in the river] must appear only natural and I for the moment inseparably a part like salmon or a flower. I cannot say well enough how this single perception has dismantled my loneliness.”
I loved that book, and that story, and even used parts of it in my naturalist talk at the hotel on the rim of the Canyon throughout the winter. Maybe I used it because, like when I was fifteen, and like now, I was lonesome. But I replaced the word loneliness with separation: I was embarrassed to say loneliness in front of a group of complete strangers. It didn’t feel like something adults (I was 23? 24?) said in front of one another.
As it turns out, I now see the two as the same thing. Good, that lesson only took fifteen years to come to grips with.
What makes me feel lonesome right now is the illusion that I am somehow singular. That I am somehow not a part of those whom I love, even when they are far away, even when I am so vulnerable, even when I am surrounded by people, even when I turn my light off alone each night.
I think of it this way: we appear like the solitary, seemingly separate trunks of the aspen trees, each growing up through fireweed, crimson with the onset of fall. We seem singular. But just below the surface we are all one, the roots of a massive life sending up runners to emerge above the surface. One tree. One life. One.
This afternoon, Rio, Silas and I sat in a deli on Government Street in Victoria and ate bowls of soup and panini sandwiches.
Outside the overcast sky foretold of winter’s flat hand pressing down on the coast.
I woke feeling lonesome this morning.
It wasn’t a general loneliness. It was specific. It wasn’t a heart breaking kind of loneliness, it was a dull ache, like something stuck under my skin, that I couldn’t, and didn’t want to shake lose. Something beautiful, beneath my skin. Near my heart.
I sat with the boyz eating lunch, and trying to stay present to them.
A month ago I sat on the beach with James Pratt, drinking beer, watching kite-surfers skip across the water, and talked about life and love and loss. “We’re never alone,” he said, and he didn’t mean that in the city we can never find space for ourselves. What he meant was that the illusion of singularity which is a result of eyes that can’t see the world as it truly is, means we feel separate from one another. We’re not. Our eyes tell me that my body, my life, stops with my epidermis. But quantum physicists, Taoist mystics, ancient Vedic scientists of India, and scraggly-assed hippies, remind us that in fact you and I mingle as one. We emerge from the same quantum soup of energy and information; we are expressions of the same whirling mass of love, probability and tendency, connected in a way that we cannot see, but we can feel.
I grew up feeling lonely. I was a gangly, awkward, pimply kid who couldn’t open his mouth and say something charming if it was written down on cue cards for me to read. But I was a poet, and my heart ached for the love of a woman – Carrie, Kelly, Tracey, others – but my overtures always went unrequited. Late at night – sometimes in the early morning hours just before the sun came up – I would steal away home and sit under a street light and write really bad poetry filled with longing, desperation, and unfounded hope. Except for the time of day – I can’t stay up past 11 unless there’s a hot tub and a serious party – not much has changed, really.
I remember around the age of fifteen confiding in my mother that my heart just ached. She consoled me, and assured me that love would come.
Of course, it did. I had my first girlfriend when I was sixteen. When I eighteen I dated an amazing woman named Beth for nearly three years. When I moved to the mountains other woman came and went from my life. It was hard on my poet’s heart. I lived in Lake Louise, and nobody ever stuck around for long in Lake Louise, until I met Kat in 1995.
I remember living in Grand Canyon National Park for a winter in 1993 and 1994 and discovering Barry Lopez’s book River Notes: The Dance of Herons. In the story called The Bend he writes:
“I have lost as I have said, some sense of myself. I no longer require as much. And though I am hopeful of recovery, an adjustment as smooth as the way the river lies against the earth at this point, this is no longer the issue with me. I am more interested in this: from above, to a hawk, the bend [in the river] must appear only natural and I for the moment inseparably a part like salmon or a flower. I cannot say well enough how this single perception has dismantled my loneliness.”
I loved that book, and that story, and even used parts of it in my naturalist talk at the hotel on the rim of the Canyon throughout the winter. Maybe I used it because, like when I was fifteen, and like now, I was lonesome. But I replaced the word loneliness with separation: I was embarrassed to say loneliness in front of a group of complete strangers. It didn’t feel like something adults (I was 23? 24?) said in front of one another.
As it turns out, I now see the two as the same thing. Good, that lesson only took fifteen years to come to grips with.
What makes me feel lonesome right now is the illusion that I am somehow singular. That I am somehow not a part of those whom I love, even when they are far away, even when I am so vulnerable, even when I am surrounded by people, even when I turn my light off alone each night.
I think of it this way: we appear like the solitary, seemingly separate trunks of the aspen trees, each growing up through fireweed, crimson with the onset of fall. We seem singular. But just below the surface we are all one, the roots of a massive life sending up runners to emerge above the surface. One tree. One life. One.
(one)
Close your eyes. They deceive you. You are not separate from those around you. You are not separate from those you love. You are not separate from love itself, because love is the energy of the universe pulsing through every cell of your body, ever fibre of your being. Loneliness can be dismantled when we come to perceive with our heart and our soul that just beneath the surface of our awareness, we are all part of the same throb of life.
I sat in the deli on Government Street and fixed my attention in the present moment. Silas on his knees, a thick sandwich in his chubby hands, his face as bright and clear as the sun. Rio, his locks of hair askew across his face, eating hungrily. I reached out and touched Silas’ face, touched Rio’s hair, told them how much I loved them, and felt the illusion slip, imaged that from within, to a insightful heart, that we all must appear inseparable. How could I be lonesome?
Its been just half a moon, and I’m learning so damn much.
(one)
